ABSTRACT
The recent and growing scholarly interest in Edith Nesbit’s otherwise-neglected Gothic tales has primarily resulted in interpretations that claim their feminist agenda was leveraged to “ruthlessly undermine Victorian [gender] proprieties” (Hadji 229). 1 Victoria Margree argues that Nesbit’s “horror fiction” demonstrates “the significance of the supernatural story as a form that gave women writers of the long nineteenth century a vehicle for questioning the material and social conditions of their existence” (440). 2 Persuasive and undeniably insightful, this kind of perspective nevertheless neglects the fact that Nesbit’s own position regarding the “woman question” was at best conflicted. While she held reformist convictions as a Fabian, a socialist society founded in London in 1884, and privately respected the suffrage movement, she was also publicly critical of some of their aims. She even went so far as to reject the Conciliatory Bill allowing women to vote, dismissing it instead “as unnecessary and even undesirable” (Briggs xx). Moreover, she would sometimes delicately parody the New Woman in her adult romance novels, or circumscribe its ideology in her children’s fiction. Most famously, she satirized militant suffragettes in the character of “the Pretenderette” in The Magic City (1910). Such strategies not only curtail her fiction’s potential feminist concerns but, in my view, also render the claim that Nesbit reserved feminist polemics for her Gothic writings likely improbable, if not impossible. Although it is admittedly suspect to mount interpretive claims based on scant biographical details, it is worth noting that Nesbit’s ambivalence with regard to feminism would never be satisfactorily “resolve[d] in her own life,” as she struggled to find a balance between her role as wife to a notoriously anti-feminist businessman, Hubert Bland, and her position as a well-known, financially independent female author in the keenly patriarchal culture of the late Victorian era (Rutledge 227). 3
